More than 600 students have been expelled from school in India amid widespread cheating — with some having friends scale the walls of exam centers to pass notes through windows, officials said Friday.
The students were among more than 1.4 million high school students taking their 10th grade school finals in the eastern state of Bihar.
Many of those caught cheating had smuggled textbooks or scraps of paper to be used for cheating, police and education officials said.
Friends, parents and other relatives of the teenagers were seen climbing the sides of some exam centers on Wednesday and Thursday as they tried to reach the windows of the classrooms where the students were taking their exams. They appeared to be trying to pass on cheat sheets with answers written on them.
Bihar’s education minister, P K Shahi, said the scale of the cheating made it impossible for officials alone to contain and that families should help.
"There are more than 1.4 million students sitting for exams,” he said. “Three to four people helping a single student would mean that there are a total of six to seven million people helping students cheat. Is it the responsibility of the government alone to manage such a huge number of people and to conduct a 100 percent free and fair examination?"
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